And...I'm spent.

So, we did it! We closed (mostly) yesterday at 4 pm. Word to the wise: Don't schedule a closing of a house for the 11th hour on a Friday before a holiday. It ain't pretty. Everything went well with all the document signing stuff (aside from almost spraining my hand from signing my name so damn many times), but we were waiting on the finalized copy of the HUD-1 (the important document) from the lender, due to a last-minute technical error that had to be corrected. After the lawyer called the lender and was placed on hold for 15 minutes, he was told that said document could arrive 5 minutes or 3 hours from then. "Then" being 5:30 pm EST. Nobody was willing to be that patient on the eve of a holiday weekend, but knowing that we'd be homeless with 4 cats on the 27th, the sellers conferred privately with the lawyer and agreed to allow us to move in as if everything had closed normally. The loan had already funded, so it's not like there's a chance they won't get their money. Worst case scenario, some numbers get rearranged and we have to re-sign some stuff Tuesday.

We spent Friday night in our new (empty) house, played pool on OUR pool table (tee hee hee), and just kind of tried not to go into shock from the weirdness of it all. Going from a 2-bedroom 2nd floor apartment in almost downtown concrete Miami to a huge (to us) house tucked away amongst the trees, with a yard, and a garage, and responsibilities? Wow. It's almost too much to swallow.

Two neighbors have already stopped by and introduced themselves and seemed to be right nice folks. It was hard (for me) to leave to come back to Miami, even though it's just temporarily to pick up the kitties and clean the apartment. We probably won't make it back to Jax until Tuesday morning, so that means 3 more nights on an air mattress on the living room floor with the wall A/C unit blowing directly up my nose. Hurrah.

But man, will it be weird once we only live in Jax, not in both places. I know we're going to feel displaced and like we don't belong for a while, but as we settle in, I'm sure we'll adjust to being homeowners.

So, for those keeping track, this week's activities were as follows:

-on Monday rented a 26-ft truck and loaded it

-on Tuesday, drove that truck and our old Talon to Jax ($250 in diesel and $50 in gas, rental price not incl.)

-on Tuesday also unloaded big truck into rented storage unit in Jax

-on Wednesday, rented convertible and drove back to Miami ($70 in gas, $4 in post-sunburn aloe vera gel)

-on Thursday, rented 16-ft moving truck and loaded it

- GOT CLOSING DATE OF TOMORROW SET

- Friday drove truck and my car to Jax in time for closing ($190 in gas)

- attended never-ending closing

-unloaded truck into our new house

- saturday rented another car and drove back to Miami ($70 in gas)

And so here we are. We just have to get our old hooptie truck, his motorcycle, and our fleet of furbabies up to Jax and WE'RE DONE. I'll probably sleep for a week at that point.